The United States Postal Service (USPS) handles a large volume of mail addressed to U.S. military personnel stationed both within the Continental United States (CONUS) and Outside the Continental United States (OCONUS). Mail delivery to military personnel is a difficult process. Military mail addresses do not have the standard name, street, city, state, format commonly used by the USPS. Physical delivery is difficult because military units/service members change locations frequently. Under the existing system, OCONUS mail is routed through the USPS to collection sites currently located at the San Francisco (SF) mail terminal, New York (JFK) mail terminal, and Miami (MIA) mail terminal. Each of these sites receives mail for a number of preassigned special military ZIP codes.
At these sites, military and U.S. Postal Service personnel provide further sortation and transportation of mail to military personnel overseas. Mail at each site is sorted, packaged and then shipped generally by plane to a distribution point associated with the military ZIP code. The sorting process uses a ZIP code sort plan that limits the number of address locations and provides only a coarse level of destination sorting. A finer level of destination sorting is accomplished by the military at the destination distribution points. Military personnel on site aid the USPS in determining where to ship the mail. For example, a large naval vessel such as an aircraft carrier receives a large number of mail pieces, but the ship may be anywhere in the world. The U.S. military tracks these movements and advises the USPS where to ship mail sorted for a given ship. At various military destination sites overseas, one of which is Tokyo, the mail is delivered to the U.S. military which then distributes it further to specific units and individual servicemen.
Mail forwarding procedures in use by the U.S. military are inefficient. Mail addressed to a serviceman who has moved is most often delivered to the old address/unit. One member of that unit, responsible for mail distribution (mail clerk), marks it with forwarding information and re-introduces it into the USPS mail stream, after which it is sent again to one of the USPS collection sites and sent on. USPS change of address forms are provided by the USPS, but seldom are used in a timely manner. Due to the high mobility of military personnel, as much as a third of all military mail is incorrectly addressed and must be forwarded to the service member's new address. During contingencies, the location of military personnel is frequently unknown at the collection sites, for a variety of reasons.
Military CONUS destined mail is handled through standard U.S. Postal Service methods and procedures. Mail for military CONUS locations is delivered, without going through the USPS military mail centers, to a military mail facility at each military installation. This mail is only sorted to the level required to deliver the mail to the installation level, usually a 5-digit ZIP code. No provisions are made to further process this mail to a finer depth or sort, or to account for military change of addresses. Military CONUS mail final destination sortation and delivery is accomplished manually using known methods at each military installation.
Relatively little effort has been directed to improving postal mail forwarding procedures. Allen et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,422,821 describes one mail forwarding system wherein mail piece addresses and bar codes are scanned and checked against a forwarding address database so that forwarding to the new address can occur without first sending the mail piece to the old address. However, the system described by Allen does not address the special problems presented by forwarding of military mail.
Commonly-owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/290,029, filed Nov. 7, 2002, the contents of which are incorporated by reference herein for all purposes, describes a system for creating a change of address database more current than the USPS NCOA database, but again does not address special problems presented by forwarding of military mail.